Story of a Nobody

Anton Chekhov

Description

A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task - an ailing, world-weary "nobody" - seized with the purposelessness of life and a sense of his own impending death, gradually becomes disillusioned with his mission, and decides to embark on a new path which will lead him to tragedy.Combining psychological detail with a strong sense of place and time, The Story of a Nobody bears all the hallmarks of Chekhov's genius, and perfectly captures the political and social tensions of its day.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714548852
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Story of a Nobody
Anton Chekhov
Translated by Hugh Aplin



alma classics
an imprint of
alma books ltd
3 Castle Yard
Richmond TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
The Story of a Nobody first published in Russian as Rasskaz neizvestnogo cheloveka in 1892
This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2002
A new, revised edition first published by Alma Classics in 2011
This new edition first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2012
Reprinted 2013, 2017
Translation, introduction and notes © Hugh Aplin, 2002, 2011
Background material © Alma Classics
Cover design by Will Dady
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84688-278-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Introduction
I t was in September 1891 that Chekhov wrote to the editor of the journal The Northern Herald , “I have a little story almost ready for you: it’s in draft, but needs to be polished up and a clean copy made. The remaining work will take a week or two, no more. It’s called ‘My Patient’s Story’. But I’m gripped by doubts of a very serious nature: will it be passed by the censorship?” The explanation for the title used in this early reference to ‘The Story of a Nobody’ can be found in another of the author’s letters dating from March 1893, the month when the story’s second and concluding instalment appeared in the journal Russian Thought . “I wanted to give it a little epilogue from myself,” wrote Chekhov to the writer and publisher Alexei Suvorin, “with an explanation of how an unknown man’s manuscript came into my possession, and I’ve written this epilogue, but I’ve put it aside until the book, i.e. until the time when the story comes out as a separate book.” However, Chekhov never published the story as a separate edition, and the early working title, meaningless without any frame written from the point of view of a doctor, was never used.
The provision of a suitable alternative title for the story proved no easy task for its author. Publication was already at hand when Chekhov wrote to the editor of Russian Thought , agreeing that ‘My Patient’s Story’ would certainly not do (“it smacks of the hospital” was his characteristically wry comment). He then listed seven further possible titles, of which some were rejected without comment (‘Untitled’ and ‘A Tale with No Name’), others with brief justification (‘In Petersburg’ – too dull, ‘In the Eighties’ – too pretentious, ‘The Story of My Acquaintance’ – too long). “‘ The Manservant’,” he wrote, “doesn’t correspond to the content and is crude.” The only title left was the one that, apparently faute de mieux , has continued to be used since its eleventh-hour adoption, and which has generally been rendered into English using the epithet “anonymous” – “An Anonymous Story”, “An Anonymous Man’s Story” and the like. The English version ‘The Story of a Nobody’ not only avoids the stutter of these translations, but offers in addition an oblique reference to certain controversial elements of the story that worried Chekhov himself far more than did the title.
The author’s concerns about how the authorities would respond to his work were clear from the start. “Although, it’s true, my story doesn’t preach harmful teachings,” he wrote in the letter of September 1891 cited above, “still, in the composition of its protagonists it may not please the censors. It’s narrated by a former socialist, while figuring in it as character No.1 is the son of the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs. Both the socialist and the son of the Deputy Minister are quiet fellows and don’t engage in politics in the story, but still I’m afraid, or at least consider it premature, to announce this story to the public.” A month later his doubts had turned to certainties, and publication of a story begun in 1887 was duly postponed for a further year and a half, with little abatement of his worries in the meantime.
Chekhov was, of course, by no means unique among Russian writers in his anticipation of problems with the censor. All the major figures of nineteenth-century Russian literature experienced such difficulties to some degree, and the years when Chekhov was working on this story were less than propitious for a narrative recounted by a self-confessed political activist. Following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, left-wing groups had increasingly made their presence felt in an empire where political opposition could prove fatal for both autocrats and revolutionaries, and their activities had culminated in 1881 with the assassination in the heart of the capital of the Tsar Liberator himself, Alexander II. His son and heir, Alexander III, took the inevitable reprisals, continuing the familiar Russian political cycle of alternating relaxation and repression, but, for all his government’s efforts, Populism, Marxism and other brands of potential revolution flourished in the fertile Russian soil. In 1887 Alexander Ulyanov was executed for his part in a political assassination, and in 1893, just five months after the publication of ‘The Story of a Nobody’, his brother Vladimir, later to adopt the pseudonym Lenin, joined a Marxist intellectual group in St Petersburg and set off along the path to October 1917 and beyond. Little wonder, therefore, that Chekhov was cautious, even if his terrorist-narrator was a figure inclined more towards inner turmoil than the propagation of dissent.
The title’s definition of the narrator as a nobody immediately throws into relief his opposition to the prominent politician against whom he is plotting when the story opens, as the adjectives used to describe them are the positive and negative variants of one Russian word. An important aspect of the narrator’s anonymity consists precisely in the fact that his life, in contrast to that of his target, has lacked significance. Now the hard lines of his devotion to the political cause which has hitherto supplied it with a framework are becoming increasingly blurred. His belief is undercut by a growing sense of the endlessly complex realities of the human condition, so often a theme in Chekhov. Thus, paradoxically, he comes increasingly to long for the security of that very life of a nobody. Being seriously ill, moreover, he is acutely aware of the proximity of death (another route to becoming a nobody), in the face of which all men, be they famous or unknown, masters or servants, are equal. The ageing statesman’s farewell to the plotter on the one occasion they meet succinctly suggests the recognition of an unlikely fraternity between them.
Indeed, a story which appears set to investigate alternative and opposed world-views is remarkable for the way it operates rather in terms of parallels. If the narrator, the manservant, has reservations about commitment, so too does the master, the self-centred womanizer Orlov, and certain features of each are also evident in the master’s three friends, the pragmatist Pekarsky, the cowardly sycophant Kukushkin, and the ineffectual Gruzin. It is surely no coincidence that when the reader learns something of the narrator’s true identity, it transpires that he bears the same patronymic, Ivanych, as his master: they are, in a metaphorical sense, brothers, both products of the same environment, both educated Russian gentlemen, and both ultimately at fault in the fate of the story’s heroine, Zinaida Fyodorovna.
As elsewhere in the late nineteenth-century world, the position of women in society was a persistent question for debate in Russia, where female activists had by the 1890s already made their mark in radical politics. Chekhov’s heroine, with her taste for domesticity and extravagance, is, like his narrator, by no means a revolutionary. But her readiness to engage in social struggle when thwarted in love gives a contemporary, perhaps ironic twist to the male-female relationships familiar from other works of Russian literature. Particularly significant in this respect are the novels of Ivan Turgenev, who is mentioned several times in the story. His repeated depiction of young women of great moral integrity, whose constancy and strength of will are contrasted with the weakness and inconsistency of the men who dominate their lives, finds echoes in a number of Chekhov’s works. Yet in her volatility Zinaida might equally be seen as a descendant of the “humiliated and insulted” inhabitants of St Petersburg depicted by Fyodor Dostoevsky, another writer referred to in the story, and perhaps also a literary source for a sick narrator with a propensity for dreams.
Shakespeare, the Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin and the verse playwright Alexander Griboyedov are among a number of other writers quoted, misquoted or alluded to in Chekhov’s story. The density of literary allusion is, however, less an example of artful narrative play – the entire story is, after all, narrated not by a novelist, but by a retired naval officer - than a realistic recognition of the significance of creative writers in moulding the patterns of thought of educated Russian society as a whole.
Fleeting references in Chekhov’s letters might suggest that he was less than satisfied with the story. According to one letter it is at best “tolerable”, according to another it was difficult to write and would improve his finances without increasing his fame. He wrote in most detail to Alexei Suvorin, specifically about the story’s ending: “You won’t like the conclusion, be